In addition to the usual reviews and comments you would find on a horror movie blog, this is also a document of the wonderfully vast horror movie section of the video store I worked at in my youth.

Friday, July 17, 2015

Heart & Soul.

(Ed- A solitary train ride to Montreal allowed me some time to write up the following review.)

I have spoken of Belgian filmmaker
Axelle Carolyn several times here, but I'm ashamed to admit I somehow missed
that her long-gestating feature debut Soulmate (a name settled on
after many changes over the years) was released last year. It was
only when I saw that her new anthology project Tales of Halloween was
playing Fantasia that I had the “I wonder whatever happened to”
moment. Thankfully, with the help of Momma Amazon, the DVD was soon whirring away in my machine.

A grieving widow named Audrey (Anna
Walton) seeks solace in a remote cottage in Wales, but soon wonders
if she might not be the only one living there.

It was a long road for this movie, as I
began posting about its progress in 2010. Carolyn triumphed over
budget restrictions, as well as cast and crew dropouts to deliver a
spirited debut. I was a big fan of her 2011 short film The Last Post
and am glad to see that the emotional sincerity present in her work gracefully transferred into her inaugural feature effort. Soulmate is a
character-driven mood piece that has the pacing of such, but my patience was rewarded once the supernatural element finally revealed itself.

Carolyn is well versed in modern horror
(having written the 2009 tome It Lives Again!), but her influences
are clearly of a much older era. In an interview, she admitted that
while writing Soulmate, she was unconsciously guided by the 1947 film
The Ghost & Mrs. Muir. It's also not hard to find shades of many
other ghost stories from the middle of the twentieth century here, as
well. The impressive thing is how competently she brought those
elements into the present day.

Anna Walton as Audrey in Soulmate.

Of course, I can't give her all the
credit. As Audrey, Anna Walton (for whom the role was apparently
written) carries the weight of this tale on her shoulders. Roles
where one is expected to make grief a tangible thing are
extremely difficult and Walton performs admirably. She was also
helped by the perfectly cast Tanya Meyers & Nick Brimble who
appear as overly helpful townsfolk. Soulmate was then further
strengthened by the beautiful Welsh countryside and the string-driven
score by Christian Henson.

Soulmate may not appeal to everyone for
there are none of the bells and whistles often demanded of genre
pictures these days (some might even barely consider this a horror
film), but for the subset that dig on British supernatural fare of a
more subtle nature, this is a gem.